cooking with bruce and mark

Culinary Myth #49: In the Middle Ages people covered the taste of rotted meat with honey and spices

Join us as we cook through a new recipe in almost every episode of our podcast, straight from our kitchen to yours. And look for the smaller bonus episodes in which we take down cooking myths or work through some of the common cooking mistakes. We'll make your laugh. Promise.

It's Tuesday and we're taking down another long held culinary
myth. This is one you can read anywhere. You probably even learned
it in school. That in the Middle Ages people covered the taste of
rotted meat with spices and honey. Where do we start to say how
crazy that is. True, there was no refrigeration and in warm weather
fresh meats went bad quickly. Which is why drying, curing, and
smoking meats were so popular as ways of preserving them. And
sometimes whole joints of meat were even submerged in vats of honey
to keep them airtight. But no one ate rotten meat, period. There
was no refrigeration but there was also no antibiotics or
anti-parasitics. If you ate rotten meat you got sick and often you
died. It's as simple as that. Plus spices were the commodity of the
day. They were expensive. They were willed from father to son. They
were considered treasures. Listen in to this episode to find out
how this myth started and the next time you hear someone say that
people covered rotted meat with honey and spices, you can set them
straight.

About the Podcast

Join Bruce Weinstein, the chef, and Mark Scarbrough, the writer, as they work their way through recipes and culinary myths. Once a week, they'll cook through a recipe in real time--complete with all the travails that could bring to this long-married couple. What's more, once a week they'll gleefully disabuse you of the greatest cooking mistakes they've seen in their years teaching classes, distilled into short, funny episodes. Twice a week at the same price! (Zero dollars.) You can't beat that. Plus, you'll laugh. Promise.